Obama’s Non-Profit On Same Dubious Path First Blazed By Clinton Foundation

Barack Obama’s presidential foundation is barely two years old, but he is taking it down the same controversial — and by some accounts illegal — post-presidency path of his predecessor Bill Clinton, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

Federal law requires tax-exempt entities like the Barack Obama Foundation and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation to stick closely to their IRS-approved missions. For former chief executives, that mission has been building and operating libraries to house their official papers for posterity.

The transformation moved the Clinton non-profit from its declared exempt purpose in 1998 “to design, construct and initially endow a presidential archival deposit,” to the vastly expanded 2004 description of “dual missions of constructing and endowing the Clinton Presidential Center and park in Little Rock, Arkansas, and continuing the work of his presidency to strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.”

Compare that statement to the mission description for Obama’s foundation in its exemption application, which gets to the same wide-open mission but without the multiple intermediate steps taken by the Clintons:

“The Barack Obama Foundation will both plan and develop a Presidential Center for future activities, including the Presidential Library, a museum and a broader campus, and engage in activities reflecting President Obama’s values and priorities throughout his career in public service: expanding economic opportunity, inspiring an ethic of American citizenship, and promoting peace, justice and dignity throughout the world.

“The foundation envisions a Presidential Center that, through its mission, initiatives, and physical and virtual presence, advances and interprets the themes of civic engagement, global perspective, health and wellness, environmental stewardship, public education, a spirit of innovation, and will become an anchor for economic development and cultivate a strong relationship with the library’s surrounding community.”

The next paragraph of the description contains a textual sleight-of-hand that enables the Obama non-profit to get quickly to the same point it took the Clinton operation six years to reach:

“Congress codified this model in the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955. The Act outlined the legal authority of the General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator to accept the gift of a presidential archival depository and to maintain, operate, and protect it as part of the national archives system.”

But here’s the problem: The “model” in the 1955 law, as well as its subsequent amendments and IRS regulations, focuses only on construction and operation of a presidential library, and says nothing about the vastly broader purposes like those that define the Clinton Foundation and appear set to do so for the Obama non-profit as well.

The IRS “Organizational Test” specifies that “in no case will an organization be considered to be organized exclusively for one or more exempt purposes if, by the terms of its articles, the purposes for which such organization is created are broader than the specified charitable purposes.”

On its most recently available IRS Form 990 tax return, the Obama Foundation described its mission as “the development of the presidential center.” Nothing is said about the presidential library envisioned by the 1955 law.

A spokesman for the Obama Foundation could not be reached for comment.

In my opinion American and European women and men are missing a fine opportunity by not protesting massively against the Trump regime's kissing up to bloody murderers of women by means of beheadingf under guise that they are 'witches'.Personally it makes me sick and the NY Times and CNN mass media fake news has NEVER SHOWN ANY CONCERN AND PRETENDS TO LOOK THE OTHER WAY.SICK!

During an October debate, Trump also told Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, "Saudi Arabia giving $25 million, Qatar, all of these countries. You talk about women and women's rights? So these are people that push gays off business - off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money."...............

Saudis And The UAE Will Donate $100 Million To A Fund Inspired By Ivanka Trump

Ivanka Trump participates in a presentation ceremony of The Collar of Abdulaziz Al Saud Medal to President Trump at the Royal Court Palace on Saturday in Riyadh.

Evan Vucci/AP

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will donate a combined $100 million to a World Bank fund for women entrepreneurs that was the brainchild of Ivanka Trump.

The announcement by World Bank President Jim Young Kim came during a visit to Saudi Arabia by President Trump, who was accompanied by his wife, Melania, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

"We thought it was a fantastic idea," Kim said. "But we had no idea how quickly this would build. This is really a stunning achievement. I've never seen anything come together so quickly, and I really have to say that Ivanka's leadership has been tremendous." The money will help kick off a $1 billion women's empowerment fund that the World Bank will announce in July, he said.

The UAE's U.S. ambassador, Yousef Al Otaiba, said in a statement that the promised donation reflects "our commitment to empowering women in our region and builds on the progress we have made in our country, where women play a role in every segment of society."

Trump often excoriated the Clinton Foundation

The donation raised some eyebrows, since candidate Trump regularly excoriated the Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from repressive Middle East regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

USA Todayquoted a June 2016 Facebook posting in which Trump said, "Saudi Arabia and many of the countries that gave vast amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation want women as slaves and to kill gays. Hillary must return all money from such countries!"

During an October debate, Trump also told Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, "Saudi Arabia giving $25 million, Qatar, all of these countries. You talk about women and women's rights? So these are people that push gays off business - off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money."

The World Bank fund, which provides technical help and investment funding for women business owners, differs from the Clinton Foundation in some significant ways. While Ivanka Trump proposed the idea along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, she is not involved with its operation.

Donations need to be strictly vetted

Norm Eisen, former ethics official for the Obama Administration and a regular critic of the Trump family's conflicts of interest, noted in an email to NPR, "In my view foreign government donations to a fund run by a reputable international organization like the World Bank for a good cause are generally acceptable."

But Eisen said the donations need to be strictly vetted and must be transparent.

"Based on what we know, there's no reason to believe that those two things did not happen. That said, the hypocrisy is concerning, and the general miasma of corruption that surrounds all things Trump suggests some extra scrutiny here," he added.

"I don't see this fund as a big problem if she does not solicit [donations] and it is entirely World Bank run," said Richard Painter, former ethics adviser to the George W. Bush administration.

"But the Saudis could try letting women drive cars too. That would be good for entrepreneurship," he said.

Earlier in the day, Ivanka Trump met with a group of elite Saudi women at Tuwaiq Palace in Riyadh, where she largely avoided sharp criticism of the country's treatment of women.

"There's still a lot of work to be done" to empower women in both Saudi Arabia and the United States, she said.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

No of course not he is the Leader of the most powerful military force on earth the U.S. does not ... ABOUT THE OBAMA/BUSH/CLINTON CRIMINAL INDICTMENT ... of suspected terrorists during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

Was Obama administration illegal spying worse than Watergate?

The Obama administration's illegal spying may have been worse than Watergate.

(Photo: Alexei Nikolsky, epa)

In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?

There are supposed to be strict safeguards on who can access the information, on how it can be used and on protecting American citizens’ privacy — because the NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in domestic spying. These safeguards were ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats' political opponents in the 2016 election.

A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter last week, based on recently declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:

More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa. ...

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor,” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. ... The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans' privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that's another crime.

Will the Justice Department investigate and prosecute former Obama officials? It seems hard to imagine. But then, so did Nixon’s resignation, when the Watergate burglary was first discovered.

This debacle also raises serious questions about the viability of our existing “intelligence community.” In the post-World War II era, we gave massive power to the national security apparatus. In part, that power was granted in the belief that professionalism and patriotism would lead people in those agencies to refuse to let their work be used for partisan political purposes.

It now seems apparent that we overestimated the patriotism and professionalism of the people in these agencies, who allowed them to be politically weaponized by the Obama administration. That being true, if we value democracy, can we permit them to exist in their current form?

That’s a decision that President Trump and Congress will have to face. Ironically, they may be afraid to — for fear that intelligence agencies will engage in further targeted political leaks.